Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research
at Columbia University

The Marriage of Philology and Media: Two 1960's Media Archeologies, w/ Jeffrey Schnapp (Harvard University)

LECTURE at 2-3pm on 24 Apr 2017
⌖ TBD

Jeffrey Schnapp is the founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. At Harvard, he serves as Professor of Romance Literatures and Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and is affiliated with the Critical Media Practice program in Visual and Environmental Studies.

Originally trained as a medievalist, his recent books concern the modern and contemporary epochs. They include The Electric Information Age Book ([Princeton Architectural Press 2012]); an anthology of essays on 20th century Italian art, literature, design, and architecture entitled Modernitalia (Peter Lang 2012); The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard University Press 2014), a publication co-authored with Matthew Battles that explores future scenarios for libraries in the digital age; Digital Humanities (Egea 2015), an essay on cultural heritage management issues recently published in Italian in the Meet the Media Guru series; and Blueprint for Counter Education — Expanded Reprint, a reprint edition of Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s 1970 work of radical pedagogy. Forthcoming in early 2017 in both English and Italian with Rizzoli International is FuturPiaggio. Six Italian Lessons on Mobility and Modern Life. He is the editor of the metaLABprojects series with Harvard University Press. Among his current writing projects is a panoramic study of the artist-designer Bruno Munari, entitled Bruno Munari, A to Z (Phaidon). (Other current or future projects are described under the In Progress tab of this website).

His pioneering work in the domains of media, design, digital arts and humanities, and curatorial practice includes collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. His collaborative Trento Tunnels project—a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as a history museum—was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture and at the MAXXI in Rome in RE-CYCLE. Strategie per la casa la città e il pianeta (fall-winter 2011). Panorama of the Cold War, carried out with Elisabetta Terragni (Studio Terragni Architetti) and Daniele Ledda (XY comm), was exhibited in the Albanian Pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture and in Erasmus Effect – Architetti italiani all’estero / Italian Architects Abroad at the MAXXI (Dec. 2013-April 2014). He also served as chief consulting curator for BZ ’18-’45, a documentation center built under Marcello Piacentini’s Monument to Victory in Bolzano/Bozen open to the public since July 2014. BZ ’18-’45 was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2016 Museum of the Year competition by the European Museum Forum.

Event sponsored by the Program in World Philology in association with the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

The Program in World Philology (PWP) aims to unite Columbia scholars across departments and schools around the discipline-based study of texts. Philology, defined over the course of its history as everything from text criticism to “slow reading” to “all erudition in language,” is at base the discipline of making sense of texts. Under this description philology is almost as old as the production of written texts themselves. Over time it has proven to be as central to knowledge as mathematics or philosophy, and its methods, like theirs, have similarly been adopted in other disciplines.

For more information visit http://heymancenter.org/events/digital-philology/.